D’Arcy Wickham

Featherfingers • SOCAN • 11
Tracks • 41 minutes
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D’arcy Wickham has a fine new CD entitled Featherfingers. Three
of the eleven tracks are his fingerpicking-style instrumental compositions.
The brief title track is a lucid, lyrical melody, lively, warm and appealing.

“Remembering” is
a longer, low-key reflective piece, darktoned, minor and hypnotic,
which has an open, slightly unresolved ending that speaks for itself. “Hooked
on you” is upbeat and quite repetitive. These tracks reassure
one that good as the lyrics he writes alone or with Robert Carmichael
are,
and good as his voice and delivery are, supporting all that is
a fully-fledged artist on the guitar.

Two of the
tunes, “Malahat
Highway”, and “Hanging at
Owl Creek Bridge”, show D’arcy as a traditional balladeer,
a chronicler of events of moment in a community, be the event
a hanging (with Tom Dooley or Danny Deever or Kevin Berry as
the
victim), or an
epic pattern of important stories embedded in geography, such
as Lightfoot’s “Canadian
Railroad Trilogy,” or Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited”.
Mr. Wickham’s songs in this genre are convincing and the
material in “Malahat Highway” could become an historical
document.

On the musical
level, I like the native drone the guitar lays down in the instrumental
bridge between verses in these
and other
of
his tunes,
though one also gets the feeling that some of his melodies
blend into a sameness. The lyric writing is quite masterful in these
and other
songs such as “Only Trying to Say Goodbye” where
this sharp line occurs:” Don’t confuse me with
words about what a great guy I am when you’re only trying
to say goodbye.”Brother of Mine” epitomizes
Wickham’s skill in varying rhyme-schemes to create surprise
phrasings, particularly when the end word of the first line
in a couplet is ‘mill’ which
rhymes with the word ‘hill’ that is placed only
two-thirds of the way through the next line so that it becomes
an internal
rhyme.

D’arcy Wickham is also the songwriter of the sad,
the balladeer of the blues (think of Ewen McColl), who’s
woman’s ‘got
that goodbye look’. He gets some good lines in that kind
of tune such as “Come back to me, that’s all I
ask/I need you in my future like you were in my past.” This
is from the tune “Can’t
Imagine Any Future”, that rises, in my opinion, above
the level of popular bluegrass to the level of a genuine, traditional
folksong
because of the high quality of story, lyric, and above all,
his featherfinger picked guitar.